Understanding diachronic change in Cappadocian Greek

Abstract

This article challenges the widely held view that a series of pervasive diachronic innovations in Cappadocian Greek owe their development to language contact with Turkish. Placing particular emphasis on its genealogical relationships with the other dialects of Asia Minor, the claim is that language change in Cappadocian is best understood when considered within a larger dialectological context. Examining the limited use of the definite article as a case in point and in comparison with parallel developments attested in Pontic and Silliot Greek, it is shown in detail that the surface similarity of the outcomes of Cappadocian innovations to their Turkish structural equivalents represents the final stages in long series of language-internal developments whose origins predate the intensification of Cappadocian–Turkish contact. The article thus offers an alternative to contact-oriented approaches and calls for a revision of accepted views on the language-internal and -external dynamics that shaped Cappadocian into its modern form.

From Fusion to Agglutination: The Case of Asia Minor Greek

“…By losing its status as an inflectional element and by being reanalysed as a theme constituent attached to the nominalizer n , the ‘old’ theme vowel or the whole ending was brought into the vicinity of the root, since the root and the n constitute the first phase that is fed into the phonological component for morphophonological interpretation (Embick ). Now, this reanalysis eventually gave rise to the relevant agglutinative inflectional pattern because the ‘old’ theme vowel/ending in its new status left enough room for new exponents to realize the number/case functional structure (for details on the development of new exponents see Dawkins ; Janse ; Ralli ; Karatsareas , , among others). Moreover, it could not condition or be conditioned any longer by the remaining functional structure; hence it could be easily generalized in the nominal structure of all forms.…”

From syntagmatic to paradigmatic spatial zeroes: The loss of the prepositionsein inner Asia Minor Greek

“…These dialects continue the state of affairs of Late Medieval Greek as far as the semantics and syntax of se are concerned (BORTONE 2010;KARATSAREAS 2013) and can therefore be considered to represent the pre-innovation stage in its diachronic loss. At this stage, se is a full member of the prepositional paradigm, which additionally includes six other prepositions as shown in Table 1 Having undergone a long series of developments in previous stages in the history of Greek (see GEORGAKOPOULOS 2011GEORGAKOPOULOS , 2014 and references therein for details), se is found here as a highly grammaticalised, polysemous element that encodes a wide range of spatial functions expressing both dynamic (Goal) and static (Place) relations.…”

“…The advantages of the diatopy-as-diachrony method for the investigation of change in Asia Minor Greek were first outlined by DAWKINS (1940: 12), and the method was later used by KARATSAREAS (2009KARATSAREAS ( , 2011aKARATSAREAS ( , 2011bKARATSAREAS ( , 2013KARATSAREAS ( , 2014 to provide diachronic accounts of such developments as the resemanticisation and loss of grammatical gender distinctions, the development of neuter heteroclisis and agglutinative-like inflection in nouns and the emergence of phonologically empty forms of the definite article.…”

“…Compared to other dialects of Modern Greek, the inner Asia Minor Greek group exhibits an impressive number of grammatical innovations, which came about as a result of the centuries-long isolation and intense language contact with Turkish in which it developed (see JANSE 2002;KARATSAREAS 2011aKARATSAREAS , 2013 for an overview). In some cases, the innovations are so pervasive that one could argue that Cappadocian, Pharasiot and, to a lesser extent, Silliot belong to a completely different typological group to the one in which all other Modern Greek dialects are found and, crucially, to one that shares many features with Turkish.…”

Convergence in word structure

“…For example, Karatsareas (2009Karatsareas ( , 2011Karatsareas ( , 2014 argues that the loss of grammatical gender distinctions is best understood as an innovation that emerged language-internally in the earlier historical stages of the language and whose evolution was driven by Turkish influence only at a later stage. These and other case studies (Karatsareas 2011(Karatsareas , 2013(Karatsareas , 2016 highlight that at least some Cappadocian innovations result from both language-internal and -external factors. They also strengthen the possibility that language-internal dynamics may condition the trajectory of change even where language contact may seem like the obvious explanation.…”